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The Man Hairdresser: You can’t drive all the way to town for a haircut, that’s crazy!:Like Like Love Haha Wow Sad Angry 3035 Rose says “I need a haircut”… and the drama begins. I transform into a tender and inspired hair artist, the girls stream Continue Reading →

Spearfishing in Maui:Like Like Love Haha Wow Sad Angry 92 Spearfishing is a delicious hunting and fishing cocktail. Spearfishing in Maui combines this cocktail with the sun and beaches of an action Continue Reading →

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For the second time this fall Sarah and I dragged our Dad up into the Mountains for an epic sheep backpack sheep hunt.

We woke up with the sun and started hiking. After four hours of hiking in the timber we started breaking out in to the open. Half an hour later we had found an old outfitters camping spot, and set up our tent. We all took a little rest and then started hiking up the valley that was adjacent to us. We sat and glassed for a while, but it started to rain and Sarah and I were getting quite cold. Dad turned around and pointed to a really big mountain that we were at the foot of. “Let’s go up there”, he said, “that will warm you girls up!” So we hauled ourselves straight up the mountain.

There should have been sheep crawling all over the mountain face but there was not one. We sat and glassed, then walked a little further, then glassed.

It was getting late and the wind was whistling across the mountain so we started slipping and sliding our way back down to camp.

The next morning, we hiked up a different valley. Half an hour into the hike Dad spotted a mule deer at the top of one of the mountains beside us. Then around noon we spied three mountain goats. We were hiking up the mountains and had just ran out of water when we walked around the corner and almost stepped right in a little stream. It was trickling right out of the mountain! We drank our fill and replenished our water bottles with the water from the spring, and continued walking. The three of us had just crested the mountain when out of the corner of Dad’s eye he spotted a small herd of about 7 or 8 mountain goats. The herd of goats soon disappeared and we continued on our way. Soon after we had seen the goats we came across a whole bunch of sheep tracks. There were some fresh sheep droppings, and a sheep pee that was only a few hours old! We were really exited for a while, but were disappointed that by the time that we had got to the timber we hadn’t seen, heard, or smelled any sheep. We got back to camp just shy of dark, ate our homemade de-hydrated lasagna, crawled in to bed, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

The rest of the week followed the same sort of pattern, get up, hike up a mountain, glass all day, and somehow managed to avoid all sheep encounters. We never ended up seeing any sheep on the trip, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

It’s time to hunt. I’m not sure what else to say. Hunting in the Mountains is such a powerful experience. It’s beautiful, it’s challenging, it provides food, it’s how people survived for a long, long time. It’s also how they died.

This was more of a scouting trip for a future trip, and as it turned out, a beary exciting trip:

We are no strangers to bears, black or grizzy, they come with the territory up here. We’ve had a fair number of encounters, even some that raised our blood pressure a notch, but I’ve not surprised a sow Grizz with cubs at short range till now.

We were dragging ourselves through snow and sleet across an alpine meadow when we spotted her at only 20 yards. To our collective delight, she did not immediately spot and kill us. We managed to sneak away to about 40 yards before she pinned us. She popped her jaws as she began to circle us with a nervous lope. We were definitely not within her circle of trust. As it turns out, we were also just outside of her kill-before-being-killed personal space, the importance of which should not be understated. When she got our wind she was quick to turn, leaving the .243 an unproven Grizz defence system. It was awesome!

The rest of the trip was loaded with beautiful mountains and valleys and streams. That’s why we’re here, to be amazed.

We were looking for sheep country and I think we found. There were a few mule deer but no giants, which is all that was open. We embraced some typical early season snow, which is good for us. Being stuck in a cold, wet weather with few provisions makes our little house seem so much bigger and warmer when we get back home.

Are you a mountain hunter? Married to a mountain hunter? Want to be a mountain hunter? Think mountain hunters smell funny? Me too, lets spread the word. Share this post on your FB or at least write a letter to your grandma and tell her about the awesome blog post you found about hunting in the mountains.

Sick of all the words? Just go to our youtube channel for pure, don’t-gotta-read-nuthingness.

Fishing in Haida Gwaii is awesome. It’s just too bad there’s nothing else to do when your not out on the water…. Oh wait! You can hunt deer all day long! Deer Hunting Haida Gwaii is like duck hunting; you’re definitely gonna get an opportunity and if you’re successful you can stuff it in your backpack. This makes it the ideal hunt for the kids:

There are plethora deer on the island, so many that the bag limit is 5 each. They are tiny and tasty and easy to hunt. We mostly drove to old clear cuts and walked through them nice and slow. If we were out for a couple hours we would typically see 5-10 deer.

The season is any buck in the summer and any deer the rest of the year (closed April-June). With a couple new hunters hoping to harvest their first big game we made certain to wait for the best circumstances. We passed on a number of bucks that were too far or did not provide the best shot. Both new hunters got their deer with one shot for a quick, clean kill.

Even I was allowed to shoot one, I think the kids just wanted me to feel like I was contributing.

And, as always, we end up having to deal with steak on the beach, Unbelievable!

Looking for an epic hunting, fishing, gathering do it yourself adventure? Like the kind of trip where all you bring is a fishing rod, firearm and salt and pepper? You’ve got to consider Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) and you’ve got to check out the video, Fishing Haida Gwaii:

The ferry trip between Prince Rupert on the mainland and Skidegate on the island is cool but perhaps the most inhibitive part of the trip (approximately 8 hours and a couple hundred dollars each way). You can get the ferry info here. It’s a little pricey compared to staying home but is way cheaper than taking a boat to Maui.

Once on the island there are a couple small towns but mostly it’s a lot of mountain and coastal wilderness. We headed out on the logging roads to Rennel Sound on the west coast and set up at a forestry site right on the beach.

In order to tame the wild waters of the north pacific we enlisted our sturdy 14′ aluminum Lund. While it is not advertised as an ocean vessel, I’m certain that Mr Lund had this purpose in mind because it handles the rollers and chop in style.

Once out on the water it was three priorities: 1) don’t die 2) catch fish 3) don’t die

We managed pretty well, no one died and we ate like Kings.

Jigging for bottom fish is wonderful for the kids or any beginner. It is as simple as dropping your lure to the bottom and jigging it up and down until dinner strikes. The other awesome aspect of jigging is the excitement of what you may bring up. Rock fish are common and super yummy, Ling cod are great and look like mini-water-dragons while halibut are the steak laden cattle of the sea. We caught them all and even hooked a spring salmon on the halibut rod.

Fishing Haida Gwaii is a serious adventure for the serious adventurer. Even for the not-so-serious it is seriously a world class adventure. Of course, sometimes going to the public library on a Friday night can be an adventure, so whatever floats your boat, seriously.

Think you can stomach the seafood while fishing Haida Gwaii or do you imagine you would become food for the sea while fishing Haida Gwaii? Either way is fine by me and either way you should probably subscribe to the blog and leave us a comment or something.

Like it when Townies get on their gridlessness? leave a comment or a thumbs up or subscribe? Hate townies and off-gridders and the government? Me too, you should subscribe, it will make everything better!

Well, it’s time to usher in a new big game hunter, and you can’t be a big game hunter unless you shoot a big girl gun. The perfect kid caliber for us is the .243:

It’s a pretty special birthday when you get Federal .243 shells, hearing protection and a couple paper targets. Time to do some target shooting!

The .243 has been a huge success for us. Not only has it cleanly killed a variety of big game animals, but it can be safely shot by the smallest of kids. Without much kick, it offers them a chance to target shoot and hunt with the same gun.

Not bad for the fist time shooting a centre fire:

We had just put a new scope on the Tikka so we had to sight it in. Her first group was taken at 25 yards and was under an inch. Confident we would hit the target, we moved back to 100 yards and she piled them up in a two inch group high and to the left. After making necessary windage and elevation adjustments to the scope, she put down another nice 2″ group at an inch high.

I’m thinking she’ll have no problem when we put a deer in front of her.

What’s the perfect kid caliber for you? Let us know, throw us a like or share us with your circle of shooters. Think kids and guns should be separated? Me too, lets expose this nonsense to the world by exposing this post on facebook!

I can’t hide it, this goat has me mesmerized. The miracle of squeezing goat teats has arrived at Tippercreek and I’m almost speechless:

Its crazy to get such yummy milk out of the hairy teat of a little goat. Crazy, but true. We’ve had goats before and loved them but never had occasion to milk them. Its been a long time coming and its even better than I had hoped. The milking only takes a few minutes and is super yummy.

I’m not sure what’s more exciting about this arrangement; the milk or the vegetation control. That’s the beauty of goats, they eat all the woody, prickly stuff that fancier animals avoid. They are perfectly suited to prosper on the litany of willow and poplar around here.

We built a simple little milking stand that seems to do the trick. It holds her in place while she eats grain and we get to milk her at a much more convenient height (rather than 8 inches off the ground). We don’t have a barn at this point, so the horse trailer is doubling as our milking parlour for now. It works great.

Goats are notorious for escaping. We’ve been using 4 strand electric fence and it has worked well so far. The baby has blasted through it at high speeds when she gets excited but has quickly returned to momma inside the fence. Under normal circumstances they have avoided it and haven’t tested it like they would a “normal” fence.

The baby is a couple months old and still nurses a little. Stealing milk is what I call it, and she won’t be doing it for too much longer. Once we goat proof a few more of our fences we’ll be able to separate them for a bit and ween her completely.

Love milking goats and milking goats and drinking goat milk? Share this story with your whole herd, goats and sheep alike. Think squeezing goat teats is for hillbillies and sillybillies? I can’t believe I just committed to the word sillybillies on the internets. Never mind. I need to re-think just exactly what I’m doing. Sillybilly.

have you checked out our Birch Beer Video? Beer and milk, that’s a thing for sure.

Meet Dave Godber, the off-grid Bodger. When we moved to the woods we did it with good friends. You’ve met Dave before in our other videos, but not like this. He is The Carpenter, in this most terrific video just released by Hand Crafted:

Like us, Dave and his family are piecing life together out here, taking it easy and generally taking adequate time to enjoy it all. Dave is a Bodger, he follows a traditional woodturning craft, using green (unseasoned) wood to make chair legs and other cylindrical parts of chairs using a pole lathe. Standard off-grid stuff really.